Oculus Rift

imitation

Interesting thoughts in this article http://www.slashgear.com/oculus-rift-consumer-version-vs-crescent-bay-basic-vr-details-06382316/ , theory is will be much like cresent bay due to the similar shape, and that it will be 1440p. I think i will stick with the dk2 and wait for 4k and beefier graphics cards to come along myself rather than being a 2016 adapter. I reckon nvidia/amd will start upping the support for VR and there should be some cool things going on in the next 2 years, but at the same time the early releases will get left for dust (hopefully ! Otherwise its a rise in sick bag sales and a drop in oculus sales.)

Dyr

imitation wrote: »

Interesting thoughts in this article http://www.slashgear.com/oculus-rift-consumer-version-vs-crescent-bay-basic-vr-details-06382316/ , theory is will be much like cresent bay due to the similar shape, and that it will be 1440p. I think i will stick with the dk2 and wait for 4k and beefier graphics cards to come along myself rather than being a 2016 adapter. I reckon nvidia/amd will start upping the support for VR and there should be some cool things going on in the next 2 years, but at the same time the early releases will get left for dust (hopefully ! Otherwise its a rise in sick bag sales and a drop in oculus sales.)

Oculus is sooo 2014, all the cool kids will be wearing HTC sets

jumbobreakfast

There will be a heavy early adopter tax both for the HMD (or HMDs ) and graphics card needed

Zillah

jumbobreakfast wrote: »

Google just bought an Irish spatial audio engineering company called Thrive Audio: http://www.mee.tcd.ie/thrive/

If you've ever listened to the virtual barber shop with your eyes closed you'll know how powerful audio can be in creating immersion even without visuals. That's fine for a static situation but in VR you need the audio to be processed in real-time to account for your head turning and your player moving through an environment so I'm glad to see investment in this area and its even better news to see an Irish company doing so well out of it.

From an audio point of view what's the difference between rift and any first person shooter with surround sound? You're still moving in three dimensions within an environment, where they need to process directional audio on the fly.

jumbobreakfast

Zillah wrote: »

From an audio point of view what's the difference between rift and any first person shooter with surround sound? You're still moving in three dimensions within an environment, where they need to process directional audio on the fly.

Good question, I'm not an expert but I can speculate. The main difference I think is that VR is more intimate than playing a game with mouse and keyboard so you expect more realism. If you are holding a box of matches in VR and you shake them around your head while also moving your head you expect the positional audio to be exactly right but I don't think that type of scenario is as important in a non-VR game (fixed hands, limited head movement) so they probably use shortcuts. If you take shortcuts in VR it pulls you out of the immersive experience.

You might have played some games where you can tell the direction of footsteps but you can't tell if the footsteps are above or below you. By moving your head in VR you would hope to be able to narrow down exactly where the sound is coming from.

The other reason that directional audio is important is that it will provide cues as to where to look while in VR so you don't miss important events in a game/experience.

C14N

Zillah wrote: »

From an audio point of view what's the difference between rift and any first person shooter with surround sound? You're still moving in three dimensions within an environment, where they need to process directional audio on the fly.

The hardest thing is just to get it to work with headphones. A lot of games have options for surround sound but usually require 5.1 systems. Then they just send various sounds to various speakers depending on the location. Headphones are different though, you only get two channels so you need to use software to create an illusion of the sound coming from in front or behind you.

imitation

I don't know if any of you guys have tried the latest vorpx, I gotta say its a big leap forward, they have put in a very solid virtual cinema mode. It makes games like mass effect very playable as you can set the screen to cover most of your vision, but not link the head tracking with you mouse which means its actually playable. Performance seems solid as well.

Duggy747

imitation wrote: »

I don't know if any of you guys have tried the latest vorpx, I gotta say its a big leap forward, they have put in a very solid virtual cinema mode. It makes games like mass effect very playable as you can set the screen to cover most of your vision, but not link the head tracking with you mouse which means its actually playable. Performance seems solid as well.

I'm tempted to try vorpx, Tridef ran into business trouble a while back and have sort of abandoned their 3D gaming side.

imitation

Duggy747 wrote: »

I'm tempted to try vorpx, Tridef ran into business trouble a while back and have sort of abandoned their 3D gaming side.

I would have had a hard time justifying it to somebody up until now, as even though its technically very good, actually playing a game for any duration was almost impossible. The cinema mode however is quite good and I think ita quite possible to play through a game with it. I would say its worth the punt now if you have a catalog you want to playthrough.

lmimmfn

imitation wrote: »

Interesting thoughts in this article http://www.slashgear.com/oculus-rift-consumer-version-vs-crescent-bay-basic-vr-details-06382316/ , theory is will be much like cresent bay due to the similar shape, and that it will be 1440p. I think i will stick with the dk2 and wait for 4k and beefier graphics cards to come along myself rather than being a 2016 adapter. I reckon nvidia/amd will start upping the support for VR and there should be some cool things going on in the next 2 years, but at the same time the early releases will get left for dust (hopefully ! Otherwise its a rise in sick bag sales and a drop in oculus sales.)

I would be thinking the same myself, will keep my DK2 and wait to see how things pan out with HTC/Valve/Oculus, AMD/Nvidia, game support and Input devices.

DK1 and 2 quenched my thirst for the current state of VR and DK2 is good enough for games and messing about with that i can easily wait until the market settles. Slightly higher resolution/refresh/tracking area of Oculus isint enough for me to justify a purchase. Vive on the other hand im really interested in the input tracking solution but until i see some really good games using it its not worth early adoption( im imagining it will be expensive )

jumbobreakfast

Recommended specs for the consumer Oculus Rift are out:
https://www.oculus.com/blog/powering-the-rift/

imitation

jumbobreakfast wrote: »

Recommended specs for the consumer Oculus Rift are out:
https://www.oculus.com/blog/powering-the-rift/

Interesting bit is we get some of the oculus specs

"In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays"

It isn't quite 1440p and they have gone for the 90hz, would love to try one out and see how it stacks against the DK2 !

The GTX970 isn't a suprise, to be honest I think its nvidias next offerings I'll be shooting for anyway, I have feeling it wont be long before its a minimum specification.

lmimmfn

Shame they didn't aim for higher than the HTC, looks like valve and Facebook are trying to standardise VR at least for the first releases, good for getting devs on board

Loafing Oaf

I think I meet the RAM spec but have no clue about the other stuff. Well I'm sure some enterprising soul will soon set up a website that'll tell you automatically if your machine makes the grade...

johnny_ultimate

Wow I spent significantly more than €1000 on a rig just a few months ago and just hit those recommended specs (GPU and CPU are the same as I have). Frankly that's going to be the big limitation with this hitting the mainstream, as those specs are simply too high for even many enthusiast gamers.

I hate to say it, but I think Sony have a slight advantage here since they'll have a uniform hardware spec for Morpehus. Of course that comes with the notable disadvantage that it will not run games anywhere near as well as Rift will on a recommended rig.

The consumer launches of VR will be interesting, that's for sure

ScumLord

I'm going to have to upgrade my graphics card, I only recently upgraded to a 770.

Taylor365

I'll have fine specs when i get my 290/380x

I'll take the processor recommendation with a pinch of salt. On a i5-2500k @ 4.4ghz so doubt there will be much difference.

Thought the specs would be more as r9 290/ GTX 970/980 run the DK2 just about fine. Guess CV won't be THAT big of a jump...unless it's all down to software.

C14N

jumbobreakfast wrote: »

Recommended specs for the consumer Oculus Rift are out:
https://www.oculus.com/blog/powering-the-rift/

My CPU is an older model than that (3.8Ghz i5-3570K) but I have a pair of AMD 290s (I currently use them for Eyefinity and never had problems with it). Does anyone know if the extra GPU can compensate for the lacking CPU?

Skerries

as Taylor says I reckon if you have a decent gpu then you are fine as processors have not really been a factor in pc gaming for years

Taylor365

Yea, the pace of CPU advancement as really stagnated with Intel not having much competition.

It's taken about 5 years to double the power of a CPU where as GPU's, the advances are nearly every year! (Going by passmark scores)

Shiminay

Market focus shifted to mobile in a big way though, that's where most of the CPU advancement has happened.

Skerries

anyone have any thoughts on the Fove?

ScumLord

I don't know what advantage there would be to aiming with your eyes. I could see this being a good addition to a VR system for making avatars that behave more like real people in that the eyes move and you would be able to make eye contact with other avatars.

stevenmu

I think the really interesting thing will be how the picture updates based on where you look. If they do a good job, and the camera angle follows your eyes correctly, applies good focusing and DOF, and feels natural then it could really help with immersion.

Done wrong it could possibly ruin immersion and make it very clear that you are just looking at a screen.

jumbobreakfast

Foveated rendering is the main benefit of a setup like this but they admit on the kickstarter page that that particular feature is a work in progress. Foveated rendering is supposed to render the area that you are looking directly at in high resolution and leave the edges to render in low res. I don't think the screen is high res enough or the FOV high enough to make it worthwhile for that purpose yet but it is definitely going to help people develop that rendering method. I reckon they'll just be going for using your eyes as an input device which is kind of cool but I wouldn't be buying this over the Rift or Vive just for that feature.

Thargor

jumbobreakfast wrote: »

Foveated rendering is the main benefit of a setup like this but they admit on the kickstarter page that that particular feature is a work in progress. Foveated rendering is supposed to render the area that you are looking directly at in high resolution and leave the edges to render in low res. I don't think the screen is high res enough or the FOV high enough to make it worthwhile for that purpose yet but it is definitely going to help people develop that rendering method. I reckon they'll just be going for using your eyes as an input device which is kind of cool but I wouldn't be buying this over the Rift or Vive just for that feature.

Id say the lag in something like that would drive you mad but Im sure better brains than mine are working on it.

imitation

Theres defintely going to be a long development period for the foveated stuff and vr in general, just like computers in general, only problem is that if its not right - it makes people sick. Hopefully they can produce something like the oculus dks - good enough to feed interest.

Dyr

Has anyone seen a recommended spec (or even a speculative spec) for the sort of rig that the valve vive is going to need?

jumbobreakfast

looks to be similar to the Oculus CV1 specs at least in resolution and refresh rate so an nvidia 970 and i5-4590k or equivalent would be a good guess.

We might find out more from Valve at e3 next month. Also at e3 AMD are rumoured to be announcing a VR-tuned graphics card and Nvidia have been very quiet about their VR-direct features (especially VR-SLI) so we could hear from them too. I'm hoping that nvidia enable VR-SLI for my 780 so that I only have to buy an extra secondhand card to get good performance.

Whatever way you look at it the early adopter tax will be high I'm sure but we have until november to save up...

ScumLord

I get the feeling the valve headset might have a lower overhead because of it's tracking system. I don't know how significant of a difference that would make if any.